HeirLoom

Family Tree
Connection Found
Globe View
Records
Family Notebook
Photo Album

Pitch

They say it takes a village to raise a child, but what if the village no longer exists? Introducing HeirLoom, an iOS app that turns fleeting family memories into a living archive, pairing a real-time conversational voice AI oral historian with a tactile corkboard "tree" of pinned Polaroids and connecting red twine

Inspiration

The people who raise us shape our values and sense of self, but modern life has scattered families across different cities, demanding careers, and generational divides. Group chats that only awaken for birthday emojis offer the illusion of closeness while irreplaceable oral histories quietly disappear. Most people know little about their lineage past their grandparents, and older generations' life lessons often vanish before anyone writes them down. We wanted to move past sterile family-tree forms and impersonal photo dumps to build a warm, welcoming space where family culture actually lives and grows.

What it does

At the heart of HeirLoom is Loomie, an empathetic voice AI companion. Instead of sending questionnaires or cold text prompts, Loomie speaks aloud with the patience and warmth of an attentive grandchild sitting across the kitchen table. It listens closely, latches onto sensory details like the music playing on an old road trip or the smell of a childhood kitchen, and gently guides elders through their memories without interrupting or feeling clinical. As memories are shared, they materialize onto an interactive family corkboard. Styled like a photo scrapbook or corkboard, the brand design moves away from stereotypical tree iconography and opts for a more homey aesthetic. The app automatically surfaces Sparks (cross-generational threads linking shared passions across decades) like a great-grandfather's mechanical tinkering to a granddaughter studying engineering today. A sepia-toned 3D globe charts family activity across continents, while a native iOS share extension lets anyone drop photos and voice memos straight into the family feed from their camera roll or social media (currently exclusive to instagram).

How we built

We created HeirLoom natively in Swift and SwiftUI, custom designing (with no AI generated images or stock assets) an analog aesthetic of parchment paper and Polaroid frames in Figma to keep the interface tactile. For voice interactions, we built a bidirectional audio streaming pipeline using AVFoundation and AVAudioEngine. The app captures live microphone audio, downsamples it to 24 kHz PCM, and streams it over WebSockets to xAI’s real-time voice model. We fine-tuned Voice Activity Detection thresholds so storytellers can pause to reflect mid-sentence without being cut off. To keep conversations grounded, we integrated the Backboard state machine to track dialogue history, relationships, and established facts so Loomie never repeats herself or hallucinates. Once a session ends, an asynchronous Python and FastAPI backend powered by Grok 4.3 analyzes the transcripts, identifies relatives, enriches profiles with historical context, and syncs updates to MongoDB Atlas. Our team worked concurrently across Git branches using Cursor, Claude Code, and Antigravity to build the client and backend services in parallel.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest technical challenges was getting low-latency, full-duplex voice streaming running smoothly in Swift. Balancing raw audio buffers, hardware echo cancellation, and WebSocket throughput under tight frames required extensive profiling to prevent clipping and audio drops. On the visual side, real-world family trees were difficult mathematically. Off-the-shelf tree layouts quickly devolved into overlapping cards and tangled string spaghetti. We had to write a custom dynamic layout algorithm from scratch that calculates pushpin coordinates, organic card rotations, and Bezier red-twine curves that stay clear and legible at any zoom level.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how human HeirLoom feels in the hand. Loomie’s patient speech pacing, paired with the personally-designed paper textures, pinned Polaroids, and dynamic red strings, bridges the gap between bleeding-edge AI and cozy nostalgia. Best of all, nobody has to fill out a single form—simply having a natural conversation automatically builds, links, and documents a family tree in real time on a physical device.

What we learned

Integrating the Backboard.io state machine showed us how critical deterministic state tracking is when grounding conversational agents in personal relational data. On the iOS side, we gained hands-on experience with audio engineering and real-time streaming, while refining our multi-agent workflows across the stack.

What's next for HeirLoom

Next, we want to integrate Grok Imagine to turn recorded oral histories into illustrated digital picture books that parents can read to younger children at bedtime. We are also exploring a one-click export pipeline to turn the digital corkboard into a physical coffee-table keepsake book, and a spatial gallery experience designed for Apple Vision Pro/Meta XR Glasses.